1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method of operating a hearing aid and to a hearing-aid arrangement or a hearing aid with a receiving unit and a signal processing unit, which can be automatically adapted to different hearing situations.
2. Description of the Related Art
European patent document EP 0 064 042 B1 discloses a hearing aid with a microphone, a signal processing unit and an earphone, in which different sets of parameters can be stored in a memory for adapting the signal processing unit to different hearing situations. As a result, the hearing aid is equipped with different hearing programs for different hearing situations, which can be switched between manually.
A disadvantage of the known hearing aid is that, when the hearing situation changes, the person wearing the hearing aid has to set the hearing aid manually to the new hearing situation. For this purpose, it is necessary to know how the individual hearing programs are assigned to the different hearing situations. Furthermore, it is a nuisance to actuate an operating element for setting to the new hearing situation.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,604,812 discloses a hearing aid which, for automatic switching between different hearing programs, has a signal analysis unit which identifies the current hearing situation and selects a suitable hearing program. A disadvantage of this is that the automatic identification of the hearing situation often does not succeed and, as a result, the hearing aid is operated in a wrong hearing program.
The automatic analysis of the hearing situation presents problems particularly if features of different hearing situations are present simultaneously. Such hearing situations may be, for example, a car journey in which a piece of music is being played on the car radio, as well as a conversation during a car journey. In these examples, it may happen that the hearing aid does not correctly identify the “car” hearing situation or frequently switches back and forth between the hearing programs for “car journey” and “music” or “conversation”.